Dissertation Proposal Defense - Sonali Mishra
You are cordially invited to join us for the Dissertation Proposal Defense of Sonali Mishra, to be held on Wednesday, Nov. 14, 2018, beginning at 12:30 p.m. in Allen Research Commons, space Red C. Below, you will find the dissertation proposal abstract and the Supervisory Committee.
Title: Designing Health Interventions to Scaffold Autonomy and Motivation
Abstract:
Health interventions yield better results when they support people's feelings of autonomy or independence. However, health interventions often neglect such support. In addition, the nature of health behavior and implicit assumptions about people's autonomy vary greatly across health contexts. I propose to explore the design of autonomy-supportive health interventions in two contexts: the hospital environment, and people’s efforts to increase their physical activity. In both contexts, people are faced with an environment that seeks to prescribe their health-management goals or even their role in their health rather than scaffold their autonomy in pursuing those goals of their own accord. In the hospital, people are often seen as patients or caregivers rather than as autonomous actors who have distinct goals and desires. The tools available have been designed to support them in receiving information, rather than to help them exert control and agency in their care. In this hospital context, I will investigate the roles that patients and caregivers want to play in their care, and explore the design of tools to help them actively perform those roles. In the world of physical activity, people encounter prescriptive attitudes about what they should do from a variety of sources, including health interventions that set activity goals for users and reward them for achieving those goals. Yet health interventions could instead aid users in finding reasons to want to exercise, rather than simply prescribing exercise. In this everyday physical activity context, I will explore how physical activity interventions could support autonomy by scaffolding the development of intrinsic motivation for exercise. Looking at both contexts—the hospital and the world of everyday physical activity—I will demonstrate how health behavior interventions can be designed to better support user autonomy, paving the way for better health outcomes.
Supervisory Committee:
- Wanda Pratt, Chair
- Julie Kientz, GSR
- Predrag Klasnja
- Jaime Snyder